At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend

Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.

The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear? Yes. My Imagination. I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself." Then you have a small imagination.

It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday - if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime - someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

The monster nevers dies.